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Monthly Archives: March 2013

An interesting survey conducted by MDI, Gurgaon sheds light on what the different concerns of stakeholders (principals, teachers, students and parents) regarding public examinations are. In order to make sense of the data, I mapped the results to see who’s concerned about what. This allowed me to figure out what the most common concern was (shared by all stakeholders), down to the concerns that were specific to an individual stakeholder.

To further understand the scenario (and clearly visualize the issues), I plotted the concerns on a graph with four quadrants (each for one stakeholder). The concerns that were shared by more than one stakeholder were placed on the intersection of the quadrants, and the individual concerns were placed further away from the intersections.

This exercise lead to a rather pressing insight. While child centric issues are common concerns for all stakeholders, the concerns that revolve around teachers–teacher’s strain, low self esteem, etc. are not taken into consideration by any of the other stakeholders.

A teacher shapes the child’s future. If the teacher’s concerns are not addressed, no amount of infrastructural changes and curriculum improvements will help in educating a child. This is one area that seems pivotal to the entire education system and needs to be addressed immediately.

To put together all the pieces, I created a stakeholder chart which marked the interest of the particular stakeholder in student evaluation, as well as the issues/difficulties/expectations they have. This enabled me to identify the problem areas that need to be dealt with and how these problems are linked to the different stakeholders.

…is pretty clear. There seem to be no doubts about it. How students should be evaluated also seems pretty clear. What we’re doing wrong in the current scenario, is pretty much everything. So the only real question is how do we achieve these seemingly utopian goals in a country with such a complex demographic and an even more complex network of systems that affect the end user–the student.